Oregon Guard's 41st Brigade returns from Iraq with a reintegration team ready to help

Jamie Francis, The OregonianSherri Farber feeds her seven-month-old, William, while coaxing Travis, 8, to do his homework last week in Hillsboro. Farber's husband, Staff Sgt. Scott Farber, is among 2,700 Oregon Guard soldiers that Scott McCrae's reintegration team will meet when they return from a year in Iraq next week.Deep inside the armory, the colonel studies his whiteboard and patiently, carefully, scrawls out his attack:

Meet Oregon troops as soon as they land and hit them with plans for work and college. Roll out months of events. Networking. Job shadowing.

"This is good stuff," he says, nodding.

When 2,700 soldiers of the Oregon Army National Guard's 41st Infantry Brigade return from Iraq this week, Scott McCrae will be waiting with nearly 50 experts to ease their transition. Five years after he retired, McCrae is still working on an army's future for the one soldier who never had one.

His son, 1st Lt. Erik McCrae, bled to death in Baghdad after an IED attack on June 4, 2004. The Tigard High co-valedictorian, who earned degrees in math and applied physics at Linfield College in two and a half years, had followed his dad and older brother Kelby into the Oregon Guard. He died along with two of his men in the single bloodiest day for the Guard of the Iraq war. He was 25.

In the months after his son's death, grief settled in Col. Scott McCrae like anesthesia. He couldn't function at the Oregon Guard where he had risen to personnel officer. He felt no sense of urgency. Nothing mattered. He escorted his wife Terri to funerals of other soldiers from Erik's battalion, nine men died that year.

"It was too much," he says, looking back. The Guard had been the Wallowa farm kid's way up and out. But he couldn't go on. He retired that September after 34 years.

Four months later, his old friend Brig. Gen. Mike Caldwell called. Erik's battalion was returning and he wanted McCrae to help its re-entry. No one organization was in charge.

McCrae turned to wounded soldiers from Erik's battalion who called themselves the "Blasted Bastards." Frustrated at being stateside with their guys still in Iraq, Sgt. 1st Class Vinnie Jacques and others were working to find jobs and other help for their buddies. McCrae hired Jacques, assembled a grassroots team of vets and met his three goals: a toll-free helpline, a refrigerator magnet with key numbers on it, and a Website.

Thomas Boyd, The OregonianScott McCrae, center, meets Col. Eric Bush, 41st Infantry Brigade deputy commander, who arrived at Joint Base-Lewis McChord from Iraq last week, among the first Oregon troops to return. McCrae leads a nationally recognized re-integration program to help them find jobs, education and housing. "They're stronger for the deployment,'' McCrae says. "We want to build on that."
Since then, the Oregon reintegration team has educated more than 10,000 Oregon combat veterans about benefits, helped 650 find jobs and hosted regular summits. They ensured that wounded Oregonians recover close to home. They sealed partnerships with the local Veterans Affairs staff and Oregon military department. With the governor's task force they helped push 24 new laws benefiting veterans through the Oregon Legislature. They connect soldiers to frontline help at the county level through service officers and helped put service officers on every four-year college campus in Oregon.

The group became the central nervous system of "Fort Oregon," the state's new coordinated effort at reintegration. It also became the model for the Department of Defense's national program.

At McCrae's insistence, Jacques was awarded the Meritorious Service Medal for what McCrae calls "his head-down leaning-forward attitude." McCrae himself won the 2007 Governor's Gold Medal.

"I didn't deserve it," McCrae says flatly. "It was the people who worked for me, and I told the governor that."

His staff and former staff disagree.

"Under Col. McCrae, our state created a program that is now required and mirrored in every state," Jacques says. "The Yellow Ribbon Reintegration name came from Minnesota, but the process was designed in Oregon."

Former team member J.D. Baucom, now an aide to Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Ore., "He wasn't like any other officer. Soldiers trusted him, he'd just lost a son in the same unit."

There are no photos of Erik on his father's office walls at the Anderson Readiness Center in Salem. No Gold Star license plates on his car. Erik's young widow, still close to the family, has remarried. As the battalion Erik served with returns from a second Iraq tour, his father, without a trace of sentimentality, is pulling double shifts to ease every stage of the re-entry, too.

"Erik is here," McCrae says. "He's always here."

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS

McCrae's top priority is jobs. Up to 1,200 Oregon soldiers coming home don't have one. Staff Sgt. Scott Farber, 47, owned a construction company before he deployed last April. His wife worked as a medical assistant and moonlighted as a bartender. But since the birth of their son, William Scott Farber, last August, Sherri Farber has stayed home and her husband will have just two weeks military pay before entering Oregon's crushed job market.

"It's panic mode," says Sherri, 36, of Hillsboro. "He's going to have try and to get back into civilian life and find a job at the same time."

She didn't anticipate how difficult his fifth deployment would be (he's been both a Marine and Army Ranger), even though they were expecting.

Courtesy of the Farber familySherri and Scott FarberBut two months after he left this time for Iraq, she was hospitalized because the baby stopped moving. She had to go on a reduced work schedule. Her doctor contacted the Red Cross, which flew in Farber to witness the Caesarean birth Aug. 12. But Dad left 12 days later.

Besides being seriously sleep deprived, Sherri Farber found she felt far more lonely, anxious and isolated than she ever imagined. Friends and family called, and sons Brandon, 11, and Travis, 8, pitched in to help, but they were also reeling from Scott's absence. Travis especially acted out in school, and challenged his mom.

Sherri tried to channel her stress -- she often had nightmares about her husband's safety -- with cleaning and paint. "Lot of cleaning. Lot of painting, the kitchen, the baseboard, shelves."

Farber says he survived by keeping busy. Working in the international zone in Baghdad, he had 310 missions guarding such noteables as Vice President Joe Biden, Sec. of Defense Robert Gates and Govs. Ted Kulongoski and Arnold Schwarzenegger. He earned a fistful of commendations, including the Bronze Star.

But those skills don't easily translate into a job in Oregon. They are best suited for a private contractor in Iraq. "I don't want to leave my family again.

"It will work out," he says. "Something always does." He's thinking instead about camping with the kids and taking William to his native Minnesota to be baptized.

By the numbers

Oregon's 41st Infantry Brigade's Iraq deployment

Oregon troops will spend one week completing health exams and paperwork at Joint Base Lewis McChord in Western Washington before demobilizing in Bend, Portland, Eugene and Medford ceremonies scheduled between April 18 and 25 .

Deployed with more than 2,700 Oregon soldiers in April, the most since World War II.

Added 650 soldiers from Nevada, New Mexico, Delaware, and South Carolia for a brigade of 3,300.
Guarded 6,000 convoy missionsover90,000 square miles .

Escorted 108,000 trucks carrying over 160 million gallons of fuel, 11.5 million cases of water, 605 thousand cases of MRE's, nine million round of ammunition, and more than 23 thousand pieces of cargo.

McCrae gets this. He said the reintegration team has learned soldiers need down time before they can look for work and so has scheduled career fairs 30, 60 and 90 days to roll out help on a more realistic time frame.

"Soldiers are in Iraq, in combat, and 10 days later, they're on the streets in Oregon," McCrae says. "That's a mind bender."

Reuniting is one area the Farbers aren't worried about. Since they started using Skype, the Internet program that allows free real-time video, Sherri carries her computer around the house talking to her husband in Iraq, as though he's just sitting on the couch in Hillsboro. Their long conversations have made their marriage stronger, he says. He's finally been able to tell her about friends who died when he was a young Marine to Beirut. She's shared her fears about his safety with him. William has cooed what they both swear is "Da Da."

"We've been able to spend hours really communicating," Sherri says. "Its amazing, we probably got 10 years of communication built up in a year because you have nothing else to do but talk."

BACK TO SCHOOL

About 230 Oregon soldiers from the 41st Brigade left college to deploy to Iraq. McCrae, who never gave his own two sons a choice about college -- "they were going, period" -- wants the student-soldiers to re-enroll as soon as possible. After managing war zones and millions of dollars worth of equipment, many other soldiers are now empowered to think there's more out there for them.

Military service has long changed lives.

When Sgt. Joshua Alcantar, 26, first joined the Oregon Guard, he was making pizzas in Portland. By the time he deployed with the 41st on his second Iraq tour, he had a 3.65 grade point at Portland State University with a major in Middle Eastern studies, focusing on economics. He is working toward a career abroad in the civil service.

He wasn't looking for love. From the night he met Eva Escobar three years ago, he told her he didn't want a relationship while he was still serving. A romance during his first deployment in 2004 ended with a break-up two months in. Even after he moved in with Escobar a year and a half into the relationship, Alcantar knew his 2009 deployment with the 41st was a deal killer.

Jamie Francis, The OregonianEva Escobar smiles beneath the 1945 VJ Day photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt that she found the day before her boyfriend, Sgt. Joshua Alcantar, got leave in February. The Portland State University student emailed that he is looking forward to returning to classes and being with Escobar. "I LOVE TO COOK!'' he said in an email. "And, I need to update my wardrobe after she threw out all my ripped t-shirts and jeans."Communication across an 11-hour time difference and months of separation was too tough. "Then, with all the problems that have been dealt with during a deployment, you go through a whole new set afterwards," Alcantar says.

Escobar, 26, said, "fine." She just liked that he brought her Ayn Rand books, and figured he would always be a wonderful and wise friend.

Then a funny thing happened. Once he got to Iraq, Alacantar, found himself "unwinding my frustrations in an e-mail to Eva, or helping her with a problem back home." She wrote about her job in the emergency room at Portland Adventist Hospital and e-mailed sweet and silly pictures. "Hearing about her problems made me forget my own. Hearing her good times made me happy." By last week, their stack of emails exchange was four inches high. Now he talks about not only his education -- but Eva learning Arabic and studying psychology.

"The year has shown me not only how much I want her in my life, but need her, as well. Before, I never allowed myself to imagine the future, now, I can't imagine a future without her."

The couple will finally see one another when the troops reach home in the next 10 days, after nearly a week of final processing.

But Alcantar will see McCrae first.

The retired colonel has himself deployed with a team to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington. They are enrolling Oregon soldiers in a state employment data base and getting their college forms completed.

Then he'll get some down time, too. McCrae and his wife will head to Disneyland with their surviving son Kelby, a police officer in Brookings, and his children, including Kallan Erik, aged 2 months. Then it's back to work in Salem.

After soldiers spend three to six months at home, McCrae says, things creep up they didn't see earlier. He'll be waiting with a whole organizational chart of people to help.